1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to a food safety administration system for controlling the hygiene or safety of food processing locations; and, mote particularly, to improvements therein which result in increased efficiency and elimination of paper based checklists.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Every food processing location, such as food shops, food factories, and the like, use a HACCP system and is required to maintain and control records of test data. For example, conventionally, a food shop or the like has a human operator or checker check daily a number of various data, such as temperature, pass or failure data, etc, for hygenic control of food items, such as hamburgers. Then, the shop personnel fills in the results of the checking of various items onto a paper based check list. This practice might not be overwhelming or time consuming if only a single shop is involved. However, when a multitude of shops are involved in checking data every day, an enormous amount of paper work and human labor are consumed. Thus, the practice is an important issue involving economics and environmental concerns. The amount of paper which is involved can overwhelm the waste collection activity. Moreover, paper based recording of data involves use of a large amount of foreign matter into the work area. Accordingly, conventional data collection involves the added risk of introducing foreign matter into food preparation and cause other problems, from a hygenic standpoint.
Another disadvantage of the conventional system is that the human checker or operator must carry paper based checklists, writing apparatus, and thermometers in checking various data at various locations within the shop. Thus, at each location, the human checker must put down his instruments and thermometer,etc, take the readings, and then write down the data. Then, the human checker must repeat the procedure at the next location. As can be seen, the constant picking up, putting down, writing,etc, require an enormous amount of time. Thus, the conventional system is inefficient, time consuming, expensive and since it is based on human data taking and recording, subject to error.
Accordingly, an object of the invention is to overcome the aforementioned and other deficiencies, disadvantages, and problems of the prior art.
Another object is to provide a food safety administration system wherein data is checked with high speed, high efficiency, and reliability, without requirement of paper based documents.
The foregoing and other objects are attained by the invention which encompasses a food safety administration system comprising a mobile inspection terminal for measuring temperature of an object and for receiving data on pass or fail of the object according to check items on a checklist, means for recording the temperature data and pass or fail data, and means for controlling the safety of the shop, factor or other food processing location using the temperature data and pass or fail data provided by the mobile inspection terminal.